Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Other books by Debbie Cassidy
About the Author
Copyright © 2018, Debbie Cassidy
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover by Vanessa Garkova
1
Word of advice: if a shady-looking bloke comes into your place of business and offers you enough money to buy that thousand-dollar dustkicker you’ve been eyeing up for weeks in exchange for a quick trip into dragon territory, you say no. Hell, no.
I opened my mouth to utter those very words, but the shady dude cut me off with a raised hand and a set of apologetic eyebrows.
“Please, hear me out,” he said in a low, raspy voice. “I wouldn’t be here with such a huge request if the lives of children weren’t at stake.”
And there it was. The dreaded hook—children. The hell, no died on my lips because there were rules—you could steal, lie, cheat, and manipulate, but you left the kids out of it. My thoughts must have penetrated my poker face because the shady dude was staring at me all expectant-like. His patchy moustache twitched as if itching to crawl off his sneaky face. The guy had dodgy stamped all over him, and I hadn’t come this far in the investigative business by taking on dodgy jobs. But sometimes exceptions needed to be made, especially when kids were involved.
I set my teacup on the desk. It was an antique, all china and fragile, and damn did tea taste good in it; wouldn’t drink my tea in anything else.
“Will you do it?” the potential client asked.
How could I not? “How many kids?”
“Pah, you aren’t seriously considering this?” Trevor’s tiny canine body quivered with indignation. The Jack Pomeranian sat up in the second office chair where he’d been browsing our local newspaper, The Daily Vine. He fixed me with his best glare. “You have a case already, remember? You should be headed out to deal with the tip-off we just received. Besides, he smells off. Tell him to leave.”
My canine advisor was right. A call had come through less than thirty seconds before this shady guy had walked into the office. The creature I’d been attempting to track for the last two days had been spotted in central Southside Cemetery. The Other had killed three nephs in the past two weeks. I needed to get out there now, and yeah, this guy was setting off all the alarm bells, but if there were kids involved…
“Let me deal with this, Trev.” I kept my gaze on our potential client.
“Pah!” Trevor slapped a paw on the newspaper in annoyance. He hated it when I ignored his advice, which wasn’t often. In his former life, before the curse, he’d been a private investigator, totally old school noir movie style, and now he worked reception at Bastion Investigations. Step up if you ask me, not that Trev saw it that way.
The man took a step forward, his hands clasped before him as if in supplication. “I can pay you five hundred now and five hundred on extraction. Please.”
He did sound desperate.
Trevor is right, a voice whispered in my ear. There is something off. Look at him, really look. Push him and see.
Gilbert Smyth, my trustee resident ghost and the best tea brewer in Arcana City, patted my shoulder encouragingly. He’d come with the building, my very own counsel and phantom shoulder to cry on. These two were my family and their advice meant everything. Ignoring them had proven to be foolish.
It was time to pop on the investigator spectacles and give the guy a deep sweep. Unkempt hair, bloodshot eyes, and unshaven face gave the impression of someone hard up. The suit went with the whole image, probably fifty dollars off the rack, but he’d fucked up on the shoes. Those shoes were at least a grand on their own, and the gold watch strapped to his wrist was no knock-off. He was playing the poor card, the desperate card, because he’d done his research, he knew poverty was my Achilles’ heel. Word must have gotten out about the two pro bono cases I’d taken on last month. Trev and Gilbert had been on the money, and it was time to see what this guy was all about.
I sat up straighter. “A grand? Nah, that’s not gonna work for me. You want me to take a walk on the dark side? You’re going to have to pay the price.”
His eyes narrowed, giving his slender face a hard edge that was at odds with his whole demeanor. “How much?”
Shit. How much did you charge to walk into a den of scaly, shape-shifting beasts that could tear you from limb to limb? I stared at the picture I’d taped to my wall, the beautiful leather dustkicker I’d been coveting for months, but a coat like that didn’t come cheap and savings were low.
What would fill up my indulgence piggy bank? “A grand now and a grand once I get them out.”
He held up his hands, palms upward, and gave me the doe eyes. “I’m a poor man, Miss Bastion. I came to you because word of your generosity has spread. I would ask that you employ that generosity now.”
A low chuckle rose up from the corner of the room where Gilbert was hovering. Our smarmy guest glanced sharply in the direction of the sound.
“Hey.” I snapped my fingers. “Eyes on me.”
He blinked slowly and turned his attention back to me.
“I’m generous, but not to people who can afford designer shoes and gold watches.”
He glanced down at his feet, his brows flicked up, and then he sighed heavily.
I couldn’t help the smug smile that tugged at my lips. “Yeah, shit happens. What I want to know is what kind you’re trekking into my place of business and what the heck you really want me to retrieve, because you have to know that no sane person would head into dragon territory without an invitation or a fucking death wish. So, the question remains, who the fuck are you?”
He straightened, and his weasel expression smoothed out into something less check-out-your-knicker-drawer and more price-your-antiques. “Very well, Miss Bastion, I see that we must approach this differently.”
His body was swallowed by smoke and then an altogether different dude was standing in my office—tall, swimmers build, blond with eyes as blue as robin eggs. He had the kind of face you could stare at for hours.
“My name is Adam. Adam Noir.”
Trevor made a choking sound. “Fucking Arcana.”
My hand was already in my desk drawer, fingers closed around the talisman I should have been wearing in the office, the talisman that would protect me from Arcana magic and would have allowed me to see through his glamour. Fuck me and my complacency. A tingle ran up my arm and the final vestiges of glamour clinging to the man fell away, and if he’d been good looking before, he was stunning now. But he’d also tried to pull the wool over my eyes so, yeah, points off
for that.
He stared down at me levelly. “I apologize for the subterfuge, but as you said, going into dragon territory is no easy task.”
“And you hoped you could emotionally blackmail me into it by using the magic C word?”
His brows snapped down. “There are children involved. I didn’t lie about that. I may have come to you in disguise, but there is a reason for that, if you’ll allow me to explain.”
He was Arcana, a fucking magic wielder, and he was standing in my office with a retrieval job involving children. The Arcana didn’t come to freelancers like me. If they had a job, they went straight to The Collective and used one of their operatives. So, yeah, I was intrigued.
“Why me?” I shrugged. “Why not go straight to The Collective, and why the whole cloak-and-daggers shit?”
His perfect lips tightened. “Believe me, Miss Bastion, if I could have involved The Collective in this, then I wouldn’t be here.”
In other words, he was scraping the bottom of the barrel with me. “Wow, you really need to work on your sales pitch.”
He had the grace to wince. “I apologize. That came out wrong.”
“No. No, I think you said exactly what you were thinking.” I held up my hands. “To be honest, I don’t give a shit what you think of me. What I do want to know is why you’re here.”
He exhaled through his nose. “Because this isn’t something the Arcana will care about and it’s not something I can go to The Collective with.”
“This isn’t some fucking soap opera where you need to draw out the scene to give the climax more impact. Just fast forward to the damn point.”
His jaw tensed. “The children that were taken are neph orphans living on the Southside. Their orphanage was invited into Draconi territory on an educational trip.”
Everyone in Arcana City was a neph aside from the Draconi, the Shedim—demon like creatures—who served them, and the host of mysterious Others who’d snuck into our world when the breach had occurred. As neph, we all carried a smidge of Black Wing blood in our veins, or so legend said. It’s what made us different, what divided us from humanity. The Black Wings had been divine beings who’d fallen from God’s grace, or so the stories said, but hell if anyone knew the truth of the matter or where the heck they were hiding now.
What we did know was that to live in Draconi territory you needed to work for the dragons, and the next generation was always welcome for a visit. I’d heard their territory was pretty awesome to look at.
Slipping the talisman into my pocket, I made a steeple of my fingers. “Yeah, the Draconi like to invite the next generation of workers to their part of the city from time to time, dazzle them with the joys of living dragon-style .... Buuut it’s usually high-profile schools, not a Southside orphanage. The Draconi want only the best for their industrial endeavors.”
“Exactly. The orphanage is still empty; they never returned from their trip.”
“Fuckers,” Trevor said. “Fucking cold-blooded killers. They’re at it again, aren’t they?”
He was referring to the dragons’ penchant for neph flesh and the rumors of the black market trade having picked back up again. Missing persons reports had been on the rise for months now, but only on the Southside where law enforcement was weak and poverty had a grip that made people invisible. The Treaty the Arcana had strong-armed the Draconi into signing specifically forbade the dragons from feeding off any neph. It forbade them from crossing the border from Westside into the rest of Arcana City with permits. But when had that stopped the scaly fuckers from doing what they wanted? And neph kids were a delicacy to them. It was a viable theory, all right. And this Adam Noir had to know it. So the bullshit about the Arcana not caring was just that, bullshit, and the fact that he was here didn’t make sense.
“Why do you even give a shit about a bunch of orphan kids?”
He swallowed hard. “My daughter was on that bus.”
“Ah.” I snapped my mouth closed.
It happened too often these days. The pure blood Arcana mingled with us lowly neph, procreating and leaving little babies behind, babies that would either have the luxury of being raised by a single parent or end up in an orphanage, because Arcana didn’t like to muddy their bloodlines. Their connection to the magic that infused Arcana City was too strong to compromise, and while some other neph could tap into it, their mixed bloodlines and hybrid natures made their relationship to the magic weaker. The Arcana Institute was a way of life, a whole fucking institution, and you could fuck and sire to your heart’s content as long as you never brought these progeny into the fold. And did anyone complain? Nope. Because we had no choice but to bow down and be grateful to the magic wielders who’d fought the Draconi when they’d invaded our world and ripped it to shreds, creating pockets of magic across the globe. The Arcana had beat back the scaly monsters with the power of the arcane and forced them to sign a binding Treaty. They’d shackled the beast, but every day was a battle to keep it chained.
And where were the humans who’d dominated this world? They’d been forced out of the magic-saturated cities while neph had been forced into them. Whereas before the breach humans had been able to live side by side with neph, afterwards the magic had changed, becoming toxic to them, mutating them and turning them into beasts before killing them all together. They’d been no choice but for them to leave, moving into pockets where magic barely breathed. The Arcana were the only humans left in the magic saturated pockets, because something in their DNA allowed them to tap into the arcane magic and wield it. Another reason they steered clear of procreating with neph—they risked diluting this gene, risked losing the magic.
The mundane world still ticked on outside of the pockets, ignoring our existence, thankful that the monsters that could kill them were tucked away behind shields of arcane magic.
So, Mr Noir had a neph kid. Rule breaker, right here. “What happened to your child’s mother?
“Her mother died in childbirth,” Adam said. “I wanted to keep my daughter ... I had no choice.”
I snorted. “So, you pick the fucking Southside?” I turned to Trev. “Give this man a father of the year award.”
Noir’s eyes sparked dangerously. “I picked the most loving home. Miss Hamilton, the woman who runs The Gables, is a wonderful woman.”
My throat was suddenly dry. “The Gables?”
“Wila ...” Trevor nudged me with his nose.
I took a breath. “How many days has it been since they left?”
“Two,” he said. “They’ve been gone for two days. It was meant to be a day trip.”
“You need to bring in The Collective. If Trevor’s theory of black market dealings is correct, and it’s looking real likely right now, then it’s a violation of the Treaty. The Collective have the right to go in with guns blazing. The Arcana Institute would want to know.”
He swallowed hard. “I know, but if they find out about Amber then they’ll kill her.”
“What?”
He sighed. “I’m a Noir, Miss Bastion.” His lips curved in a wry smile.
“Ah, shit,” Trevor said. “I knew that fucking name meant something.”
“One of the three founding families,” Gilbert said from by the window. “You’re an heir, aren’t you?”
Adam’s lips twisted. “Yes. And the rules for heirs are different. Our progeny must be pureblood. If not, they are put to death.”
My blood pressure ratcheted up a notch. Killing children? “Hell, no. That cannot be an actual practice.”
He ducked his head. “It’s not something we advertise, and not many people know about it.” He glanced at the window. “Your friend, however, seems to.”
Gilbert was ominously silent.
“What I’m telling you now must stay between us. I’m putting my life at risk just by being here. I would have offered you more money but all Arcana Institute funds are tracked through the Central Bank. Any large withdrawals are flagged and must be explained on audit. I can’t risk
that.”
But a grand would be peanuts to them; they wouldn’t bat an eye. “I’ll take the case.”
His shoulders sagged in relief. “Thank you. I did my research, and outside of The Collective, you’re the most trusted investigator in the city. You have a 100% retrieval rate. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Damn straight I did, which was why The Collective had been trying to recruit me for the past six months. But there was no way I was letting them test me for the gene marker that allowed select neph to travel between pockets. Being prodded and poked wasn’t on my to-do list, and puppet strings weren’t a good look on me. Yes, it meant I was grounded, stuck in Arcana City for life, but so were ninety percent of the population. The world existed in pockets now. Cities like Arcana dotted between the mundane pockets of reality with the Arcana Institute at the helm of each one. Stepping outside of the magical borders would kill me in minutes if I didn’t have the gene marker. Best to stay put. There was plenty to be getting on with right here.
I rapped my fingers on the desk. “Draconi territory is unmapped. They could be anywhere.”
“The equinox celebration,” Gilbert said softly. “It’s tonight.”
Noir paled. “How did you know that? It’s not common knowledge.”
I looked from Noir to where I was certain Gilbert was hovering. “Okay, can someone please fill me in?”
“The equinox celebration is when the Draconi gather to give offerings to their liege,” Gilbert said. “A ceremony of thanks for the liberation she provided in bringing them out of their supernatural prison and into this world.”
This was the thing about Gilbert. He seemed to know stuff about stuff that other people didn’t—another reason for my 100% retrieval record.
City of Demons (Chronicles of Arcana Book 1) Page 1
